"Yes, sir," he said, and started shouting orders. The first cart moved out in minutes, with Captain Wladyclaw acting as point man.
Even doing a quickstep was torture for the men, but we pushed on into the night. At around midnight I got word that we now had an even gross of companies in the column, and I hoped that they would be enough to handle whatever was happening at East Gate. By this point each of the men had been able to get a few hours' sleep while riding the carts, and I figured that they could take it. I gave the order to go double time.
I found myself dozing in the saddle, but fortunately a Big Person doesn't need to sleep at all. We pushed on, changing pullers every quarter hour.
I wished that there was some word from Baron Vladimir, but none had come. Had he encountered still more Mongols? Had the courier failed to make it through to him? This business of not knowing what was going on was nerveracking. I'd often heard of the "fog of war," but I never would have believed that it could take so much out of a commander.
If the Mongols had gotten to East Gate, had they gone beyond it? Were the boys at Eagle Nest under attack? The girls at Okoitz? And what about my people, my wife and children at Three Walls? Had all of southern Poland been overrun?
And what of East Gate? Was it still standing? It was our strongest fortification next to the city of Three Walls. It had six towers surrounding the castle, each nine stories tall and made of reinforced concrete, with a dozen swivel guns on top of each one. A low two-story wall connected the towers, and while that wall wasn't tall enough to stop footmen with ladders, no horse could ever get over it. Then six dozen yards inside those defenses was a concrete castle that was as strong as I knew how to make it. The walls were six stories high and protected by six more towers, each eight stories tall. The whole complex bristled with guns and had all sorts of nasty tricks to play on an attacker.
How could such a fort be taken by an enemy with only horses and arrows? How could a completely concrete structure possibly be on fire? To be sure, the fort was manned by women, but they were all properly trained and highly motivated. Much of their ammunition had had to be transferred to the riverboats during the Battle for the Vistula, but a great deal was still left to them. They were up to their armpits in refugees, but the captainette in charge should have been able to handle things. With that strong a fort, all she had to do was close the gates, and then she could laugh at the enemy. The walls were too tall to be scaled and too strong to be battered in.
Well, outside of the walls was the huge Riverboat Assembly Building, and it was made of wood.
A cold feeling went through me. Our casualties during the Battle for the Vistula were much higher than I had expected them to be. The castle had been filled to the rafters with civilian refugees, so I had the loft of the assembly building converted for use as a hospital. Those wounded men were at the mercy of the enemy, and the Mongols didn't know what mercy was!
We pushed on through the night and into the morning. The men were staggering with fatigue, and I found myself dozing off in the saddle, dreaming strange dreams and suddenly jerking back into reality, unsure of whether I had dreamed or was hallucinating or was actually trying to survive in an alien environment. I saw my pregnant wife, Francine, naked with her feet nailed to a door frame, her belly horribly slashed and her throat cut open by my own sword. I saw my children by Krystyana and Cilicia murdered on the ground, their tiny heads bashed open on the rocks. Eventually the nightmares of my dreams of torture and the nightmare of my tortured reality fused into a living horror that went on and on forever. Yet when I was sure that I could go no farther, when I knew that I must fall off my mount and sleep forever, I looked and saw the troops gasping, running, staggering, splashing on the muddy boards beside me. If they could go on, then so could 1. 1 drew strength from their dedication and pushed onward.
It was well past noon when we got to East Gate. The Riverboat Assembly Building was gone, reduced to a few blackened stumps sticking up from rain-soaked foundations. The Enterprise was at the docks, next to four hulks burned to the waterline, and the city was guarded by my own troops. A sentry waved us through, but I stopped to talk to him. "What's going on here, warrior?" I asked.
"We got here at dawn by riverboat, sir. Everybody was dead. "
"Dead? How many Mongols were involved? Which way did they go?"
"I don't much know anything else, sir. I've been standing guard ever since we got here, and nobody's told me nothing. Maybe you'd best talk to Baron Tadaos. He's back on the boat, I think."
I told the men in my relief column to pull into the railroad yard and rest, and once there most of the men pulling just lay down in the cold spring rain and fell asleep. Those on the carts were already sleeping.
Captain Wladyclaw was near at hand. I told him to get fresh scouts out on Big People and to find out what he could.
Baron Tadaos was in his cabin, debriefing a young corpsman who was crying and shaking in his chair. The man's clothes were badly burned, his hair was mostly gone, and there were blisters on his hands and face.
"Come in, sir, and sit down. There's some terrible things happened here," Tadaos said.
I sat, grateful to sit on something that wasn't a saddle. "Maybe you'd best tell me the story from the beginning, Baron."
"Yes, sir. I got here yesterday around noon and saw the boat house was burning. I'd put off my company of troops with you almost a week before, so I was down to the boat crew and the signal group under Baron Piotr. Mongols was all over the place, but we docked between two of the other boats that was here. See, half my boats was in port for lack of repairs, fuel, and ammunition. We only had a dozen rounds for each of the guns, but I figured that we'd see what help we could be, anyway."
He was interrupted as an armored boatman came in with a big tray heavily laden with food and drink. "We found a storeroom in the castle that hadn't been broken into, sir. You haven't eaten since yesterday, and I promised your wives that I'd take care of you, sir. "
He set the tray on the desk and left without another word.
"I can only pray that the girls are still alive somewheres. I guess we all need to eat. Dig in, gentlemen," Tadaos said.
"But like I was saying," he said with food in his mouth, "we left three gunners on the bow to do what they could, and the rest us went out with swords and pikes. I was even out of arrows, so I left my bow behind. Never did see it again."
"We joined up with what was left of the boat repairmen, the crews of the other boats, and the medics that was taking care of the wounded in the hospital here. A lot of the walking wounded was with us, too, but we was still way outnumbered. Them Mongols being on horseback didn't help none, neither. We lost us a lot of men, and they pushed us back to the boats."
"Only by then most of the boats was on fire, except for this one on the end, the Enterprise. The engineman on the boat had brains enough to have a head of steam up, and we had no choice but to push off and look for help."
"I didn't feel right doing that, since all five of my wives was in the castle, or so I thought, and it felt like I was murdering them and the kids, too. But it was run for help or die right there for no good reason, so we ran.
"Those damn radios of yours haven't worked for a week, but when we got to Cracow, we saw that it was burning, too. That's when I ran into you. Doing what you said, we collected up four companies of troops, all of which I could get aboard, seeing as how they didn't have no war carts, and we ripped down the docks and a dozen sheds nearby to fuel our trip back here. It damn nearly wasn't enough. I'd already given the order to start tearing down the boat when the lookout spotted East Gate, and we made it on our head of steam with the boat still intact. Just as well, since this just might be the last boat we got left!"